I had a counselor once tell me I shouldn’t let my kids have unsupervised screen time because if they look up illegal things I or my husband could go to jail.

I thought about this, and made a list of things that could send us to jail – buying drugs/weapons on the web? Eh, I have much bigger problems if they are doing that, then restricting internet use. That won’t solve those kinds of problems.

Porn? Yeah, that problem makes me have uncomfortable conversations (for me) but the fact is porn will always be a part of their life, and just like my parents didn’t want to talk about birth control – I have to talk about porn.

The only real concern I could come up with was child porn. I told my kids – don’t look at child porn because dad will get arrested and so could you. At which case they looked at me with such discuss and I was reminded of one simple rule: fear will make you forget the logical solution.

Just like doing drugs – looking at that type of porn has so much more behind it than accidentally seeing it and liking it (vs two consenting adults having sex). It has trauma, abuse, and a whole mess of things. My kids aren’t going to be attracted to illegal things without a reason. I don’t need to focus on the fear of the internet, I need to focus on what is happening in the family to influence my kids searches, and there is not an app to monitor that.

Too many schools still rely heavily on memorization as the primary means of instruction. Thirty-plus kids sit passively in a squadron, listening as an angry teacher perorates on a theme, then going to home to read and commit to memory the next chapter in a vast committee-assembled tome so they can fill in the right bubbles next Friday.

This has been the method for centuries. It’s still the universal method in many other countries, like Korea, which regularly leads rankings of school outcomes. Punish, memorize, cram, high stakes exam. Korean kids go to school 16 hours a day, plus Saturdays. Korean kids do math incredibly well, incredibly fast… and they also have the highest suicide rate in the developed world. Korea also sends the highest proportion of kids abroad to study, perhaps to get away from that system. I would, if I were Korean.

My son went to a very traditional American school last year. It gave three to five hours of homework every night, all very repetitive and memorization-centric. Most of the kids he knew went to evening math classes, because they couldn’t keep up with class otherwise, and I know some parents did kids’ homework for them. The education was well-delivered and effective for those classes where memorization is a big part of the process, like Latin. It was sad and useless for those classes where inquiry and debate should be central to the process, like English and History.

This year my son is at a progressive private school, and class couldn’t be more different. History proceeds not by memorizing chapter after chapter in the mandated textbook, but by reading and discussing the most recent and fascinating works about the time period under study. Instead of coming home dispirited and burdened, he comes home excited and engaged.

Part of how school succeeds in maintaining the relevance of its classes is by empowering its teachers. This takes support for genuine professional training and continuing education. An environment is created in which all members of the community are lifelong learners, so class plans get updated constantly as teachers learn new things. Teachers are given latitude to determine their focus, syllabus, projects and assessments. This results in a level of enthusiasm unknown at schools where the state or district determines what must be taught, and the teachers teach the same book year after year.

Schools can respond to students’ changing needs in both content and form of learning and expression, but not if they’re chained to the decisions a committee of bureaucrats made decades ago.

This article reminds me of the quote“Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.” if you need any assistance to help your child, you can visit, https://edu-birdie.us/service/dissertation-formatting-services.html